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תקנות פון בלאג: יעדער קען שרייבען תגובות, אבער נישט קיין ניבול פה, באליידיגען אדער סטראשענען, ווער עס וועט נישט איינהאלטען די תקנות וועט מען חוסם זיין..Rules of the Blog: Everybody is welcome to write comments, however no vulgar language, insults or threats will be tolerated, you will be banned immediatelyDo NOT keep changing your Nick when writing comments, I can recognize you and will ban youIf you are aware of any molestation in the Jewish community, please report it to the proper authorities, and then please send us an emil with as many details as possible, so we can follow up and warn the TziburThis Blog is here for a purpose - to fight pedophilia and znus, not for snide remarks, filthy comments or threats

Somewhere in Utah a child was
being repeatedly abused, as shown in photographs and videos that had spread
around the world via the Internet. But try as he might, Ross was no closer to
finding that child or tracking down the abuser. It was, in a word, frustrating.

The case had landed on the
desk of Ross, an FBI special agent, in June 2009 after the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children received images and videos from law enforcement
of a child who appeared to be about 6 or 7 years old being molested by an adult
Hispanic male. The center determined the abuse likely occurred in Utah because
reviewers could see a Salt Lake City telephone directory in the background;
they also traced a radio ad audible in the video to a West Valley City auto
dealer.

The center sent the images to
the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force in Salt Lake City, to
which Ross is assigned. With help from the Intermountain West Regional Computer
Forensics Laboratory, other clues about the images were uncovered.

Some abuse appeared to have
taken place in a Las Vegas hotel room; in the background, propped on a night
stand, was a photograph of the child taken at the Stratosphere. At first, it
appeared the images showed other victims being abused, too, but the lab, using
a Utah Jazz pennant pinned to a wall as a marker, “cemented the fact that it
was the same kid, over several years in Utah and Nevada,” Ross said.

And that made Ross more
determined than ever to identify the man who had taken such advantage of a
small child.

ICAC sent photos of the child
to school resource officers throughout the state, hoping one might recognize
the kid. Ross exhaustively reviewed Hispanics listed in the state’s sex
offender database, hoping to match one to the man in the images. ICAC also
canvassed hotels along the Las Vegas Strip, trying to cross reference guests
who visited from Utah during the time period the abuse occurred.

“It was a massive undertaking
that led to absolutely nothing,” Ross said. “It was frustrating. We didn’t find
anything.”

But then the lucky breaks
began.

The mentor »
That October, FBI agents in Los Angeles were working what they’d dubbed the “Lost
Boys case,” which involved a ring of pedophiles who traded images of child
pornography. Their investigation led to a Missouri man who posted a series of
images and videos online, which happened to include images of the child Ross
was desperately trying to locate.

When agents interviewed the
man, they learned the name of the child victim, the city where the child lived
— yes, it was in Utah — and even the name of the man who’d filmed himself abusing
the child: it was Tony Cardenas. Last he’d heard, the man said, Cardenas was
either living in Mexico or dead.

Within days, Ross met with law
enforcement where the victim lived and showed officers the child’s photo. Yes,
they knew the child.

As it turned out, in 2008 the
child had made a veiled disclosure to a school resource officer that Antonio “Tony”
Cardenas, his mentor from the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Utah program, had
shown him dirty movies on television. But in a formal interview, the child,
then 11, recanted the earlier comments — something Ross said happens
frequently.

“It is a humiliating
experience for these kids,” said Ross,who was a therapist for child victims of
sexual abuse before joining the FBI.

But when Ross met with the
victim, who was now 12, the real story spilled out.

The child was in first grade
when Cardenas became his mentor. The molestation and rape had begun shortly
after, the child said, and continued until early 2009 when Cardenas, apparently
spooked by his conversation with the resource officer, fled to Mexico.

By then, Cardenas also knew
the videos that he had given to a friend in Missouri to view and edit had,
instead, been posted on the Internet, where they quickly became among the most
popularly traded child pornography in the world. And he knew those videos
showed his own face.

It did not surprise Ross that
the child kept quiet all those years about what Cardenas was doing.

“Here is a kid who has no
father figure,” Ross said. “This guy comes in and fills that void. ... To them,
the sexual abuse is a small price to pay for the attention they receive from
these guys.”

A boy also may be reluctant to
disclose abuse for fear others will think he is homosexual. Both boys and girls
may fool themselves into believing the abuse is their own fault, especially
when the abuser is a family member or someone like Cardenas who has skillfully
inserted himself or herself into the family.

Ross learned from the victim’s
mother that Cardenas had spent a lot of time with the family, joining them for
all kinds of activities and on family camping trips. She trusted him so much
she even allowed Cardenas to take the child on a trip to Las Vegas. And since
returning to Mexico, Cardenas had kept in touch with the child by email and
weekly telephone calls, the mother told Ross.

As Ross laid out what his
investigation had uncovered, the mother was overwhelmed with rage and by a
sense of betrayal. Understandably, she wanted to get on the phone and let
Cardenas know she was on to himand so was the law; she wanted to cut off his
contact with her child.

But Ross couldn’t let her do
any of that.

The trap »
After months of work, Ross was finally closing in on Cardenas. But how to get
him out of Mexico?

The agent told the victim’s
mother he needed her help. When Cardenas called, he wanted her to either make
excuses for why her child couldn’t take the call or, if that proved impossible,
to monitor the calls. Most difficult of all, perhaps, he asked her to pretend
she knew nothing about the abuse.

In November 2009, a federal
grand jury in Utah indicted Cardenas as Ross continued to work on a way to get
him back in the United States. He reached out to the victim’s mother again,
seeking any information or ideas she might have — and as it happened, she had a
suggestion.

Her child’s birthday was in
early January. What if she told Cardenas she was planning a surprise birthday
party and invited him to come back to Utah to help celebrate?

“She reached out to Tony and
lucky enough for us, that’s exactly what he did,” Ross said. “We would still be
dealing with all kinds of treaties, just trying to locate him and get him up
here but we used the mom and she was awesome. We wouldn’t have him in custody
if it weren’t for her.”

Cardenas paid a “coyote”
$2,500 to bring him back across the border and his family drove from West
Valley City to Arizona to pick him up and bring him to Utah.

On the day set for the
surprise party, a “small army” of agents and ICAC officers gathered at two
locations: the victim’s grandmother’s home, where the party was supposed to be
held, and at the home of Cardenas’ family — where, after a long wait, a car
finally pulled up. Seven people got out and Ross wasn’t sure if Cardenas was
among them. He asked the victim’s mom to call Cardenas’ cell phone and sure
enough one of the men milling about the yard answered. Cardenas had lost a lot
of weight and, after months in a more sunny climate, his skin was darker.

Shortly after, an officer
pulled Cardenas over as he drove to pick up the victim, whom he believed he was
taking to dinner while the family set up the party.

“At first I kept looking at
him because I wasn’t sure it was him — until he pulled out the drivers license
we all had stapled to our desks,” Ross said. “We pulled him from the car,
handcuffed and interviewed him. That was it. We had him in custody thanks in
large part to mom’s ability to keep her cool and play this script we had
written out.”

Only, that wasn’t quite the
end of it.

A new discovery »
About two months after Cardenas’ arrest, Ross was invited to Lyon, France, to
work with Interpol on some child pornography cases.

Ross had been there just a
couple days when he was asked to look at a series of images and videos in the
Interpol database believed to have been produced in North America. His task:
Try to figure out where the images were made based on items and scenery in the
background. The first images he viewed showed three young Hispanic boys being
molested as they slept. The male abuser’s face had been blacked out.

But as Ross stared at one of
the photos, he kept thinking that the man’s floppy ears and hairline looked
familiar.

“I was wondering if it was
Cardenas and another group of kids. But I can’t believe that I’d be that lucky,”
he said, recalling the moment. “It was too uncanny to believe.”

He pulled up the booking photo
taken of Cardenas in Utah, lined it up with the other photos, taken several
years before the Utah victim’s abuse began, and called over a few Interpol
agents. It was unanimous.

“It was the same guy,” Ross
said.

He then sent photos of the
children to an officer in Utah and asked him to see if Cardenas’ relatives —
who had so far refused to believe the allegations against him — recognized the
children. They did: They were Cardenas’ nephews.

“Until that point [Cardenas]
was going to go to trial and make us put this kid on the stand and talk about
all [these] things,” Ross said. “Once we showed the family photos of him
molesting his own nephews, that’s when he decided he wasn’t going to fight this
any longer.”

In fact, Cardenas had told
investigators he wasn’t the one who had hurt his victim — the police were.
According to Ross, during his interview Cardenas had said, “You guys hurt him
when you talked to him about what happened.”

Cardenas told investigators he
belonged to a “community” that didn’t see anything wrong with adults having sex
with children. Members gained access to more “exclusive” parts of the porn
community by contributing child pornography they’d produced, Cardenas said.

“That is kind of how these
pictures go out on the Internet,” Ross said. “He gave them to a friend and the
friend used them to get into a more exclusive group of child pornography
traders.”

Once the images got on the
Internet, they spread like wildfire. When Ross asked the national missing
children’s centerto send him incident reports involving the initial Utah
victim, he received a report that was 641-pages long.

“This series of images has
been in the hands of thousands upon thousands of people,” he said.

Ross has and continues to
receive requests from around the country to testify in child pornography trials
involving individuals who have viewed those images.

On June 18, Ross sat in a Salt
Lake City courtroom and watched as U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups sentenced
Cardenas to 35 years in a federal prison. Cardenas will be 67 by the time he
completes his sentence and, with treatment and time, hopefully no longer a
threat to young children.

“The perseverance of law
enforcement officers working on child exploitation cases makes all the
difference in our efforts to help bring justice to the victims of this
reprehensible conduct. This case is a graphic example of the skillful and
dedicated work officers are doing around the state to protect children from
predators,” said Melodie Rydalch, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in
Utah.

There is nothing Ross can do
to recall copies of the images floating around cyberspace, nothing he can do to
alter the fact that the five identified victims — and he believes there are
more — will be dealing with what Cardenas did to them for the rest of their
lives.

But with Cardenas behind bars,
there is some satisfaction for Ross.

“Knowing that this kid isn’t
going to be hurt again by this guy is awesome,” he said.

What parents can do

Jeff Ross has worked hundreds of child
pornography cases and if he has one bit of advice for parents about how to
protect their children, it is this: Trust your instinct and follow it.

For him, that means being “incredibly
suspicious of any males that have relationships with any of my children,” Ross
said.

It did not surprise Ross that the Utah
child victim kept quiet all those years about what Antonio Cardenas was doing.

“Here is a kid who has no father
figure,” Ross said. “This guy comes in and fills that void. ... To them, the
sexual abuse is a small price to pay for the attention they receive from these
guys.”

Cardenas, like many pedophiles, sought
settings that gave him the opportunity to meet and interact with children,
according to Ross. He had worked as a school bus driver, an after-school tutor,
a Junior Jazz basketball coach and as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters of
Utah. Until his arrest, Cardenas had no criminal history or allegations of
inappropriate behavior that might have triggered concern by employers or
parents.

“I know people who are with Big
Brothers Big Sisters — my sister was one — and they do outstanding work, but
within that group there are going to be people” like Cardenas, Ross said.

Too often, a victim’s parents will
look back and say they were somewhat suspicious of this or that but dismissed
it because the individual had been highly recommended by other parents or belonged
to a well-regarded group.

“If your instinct or intuition is
telling you something, don’t dismiss it,” Ross said. “You have to be careful
with who your children are hanging out with.”

Ross recommends the book The Gift of
Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence by Galvin de
Becker as a good resource for parents.